fe. That
life is so completely misunderstood by the foreigner that it deserves
a few words of explanation.

I am not yet old enough to envy youth, nor sourly sophisticated enough
to deal sarcastically or even lightly with their worship and their
creeds, that once I shared, and with which lately I have been, under
the most hospitable circumstances, invited to renew my acquaintance at
the Commers and the Mensur.

One may be no longer a constant worshipper at the shrine of blue eyes,
pink cheeks, flaxen hair, and the enshrouding mystery of skirts, which
make for curiosity and reverence in youth; one may have learned,
however, the far more valuable lesson that the best women are so much
nobler than the best men, that the best men may still kneel to the
best women; just as the worst women surpass the worst men in
consciencelessness, brutal selfishness, disloyalty, and degradation.
The female bandit in society, or frankly on the war-path outside,
takes her weapons from an armory of foulness and cruelty unknown to
men; just as the heroines and angels among women fortify themselves in
sanctuaries to which few, if any, men have the key.

One returns, therefore, to the playground of one's youth with not less
but with more sympathy and understanding. Far from being "brutalizing
guilds," far from being mere unions for swilling and slashing, the
German corps, by their codes, and discipline, and standards of manners
and honor, are, from the chivalrous point of view, the leaven of
German student life. In these days many of them have club-houses of
their own, where they take their meals in some cases and where they
meet for their beer-drinking ceremonies.

There is of course a wide range of expenditure by students at the
German universities, whether they are members of the corps or not. At
one of the smaller universities in a country town like Marburg, for
example, a poor student, with a little tutoring and the system of frei
Tisch -- money left for the purpose of giving a free midday meal to
poor students -- may scrape along with an expenditure of as little as
twenty dollars a month. A member of a good corps at this same
university is well content with, and can do himself well on, seventy
dollars a month. I have seen numbers of students' rooms, with bed,
writing-table, and simple furniture, perhaps with a balcony where for
many months in the year one may write and read, which rent for sixty
dollars a year. One may say roughly tha